In places where governments are smaller, taxes are lower, regulations are lighter, and property rights are more secure, people tend to be more generous, trustful, and tolerant. Although progressives may find this proposition hard to accept, there’s an ever-increasing stack of empirical evidence to support it.
Can I let you in on a not-so-little secret? The Democrats in Washington don’t really mean it. The Republicans don’t, either.
When then-Congressman Jim Martin ran for governor in 1984, he sought to combine Reagan-era thinking about free markets with the practical approach to government he’d learned two decades earlier as commission chairman of North Carolina’s most-populous county, Mecklenburg.
The state of Washington has it. California has it. Michigan has it. Oklahoma has it. Nebraska has it. Arizona has it. Florida, New Hampshire, and Idaho have a version of it.
The $1 trillion infrastructure bill President Joe Biden signed into law on November 15 attracted the votes of both Republican and Democratic lawmakers in Washington and has attracted praise from many North Carolina leaders, as well — once more illustrating the fact that bad ideas can also be popular ideas.
When Carolina Journal first reported first-term U.S. Rep. Madison Cawthorn’s intention to abandon his current district next year to run in an adjacent one, CJ quoted Cawthorn as saying his decision was part of “a strategy to increase conservativism in North Carolina.”
The COVID-19 crisis had enormous and destructive consequences for our health, our economy, our education systems, and the quality of our social and family lives. Now, just imagine how much worse the consequences would have been in the absence of modern information and computer technology (ICT).
In this case, however, my inspiration came not from the realization that something I wrote might deserve to be trashed. I’d already had that realization decades ago after penning one of my first columns, when its subject complained to me that I’d misquoted him, misunderstood his point, and even misspelled his name. Other than that, it seems, the article was decidedly mediocre.
Although some pundits and grifters may claim otherwise, there’s nothing new about populism. It comes in waves, often but not always in response to sharp economic downturns, and is driven by outrage against the mistakes or misdeeds of political elites.
A year ago, would you have correctly guessed that meetings of local school boards would be among the most politically charged events of 2021, and that school-board races would be among the most contested of the next election cycle? If so, more power to you. I would have gotten those questions wrong.
As they witness rapidly escalating costs for building, buying, and maintaining homes, the vast majority of North Carolinians clearly want their leaders to do something about affordable housing.
If you were reading this column a year from today, just days before the 2022 midterm elections, I’d tell you that North Carolina Democrats were about to experience a catastrophe.
